We walked into the city on Saturday, and went to look at the newly opened Barangaroo Reserve. Built on the old port area between Walsh Bay and Darling Harbour, the 5.7 hectares site is landscaped with more than 75,000 native trees and shrubs, and the 10,000 blocks of sandstone used were excavated directly from the site.
Barangaroo was apparently a powerful indigenous woman who played a great role in the early days of Colonial Sydney, Barangaroo was also the wife of Bennelong - and Bennelong Reserve is the name of the site of the Opera House.
We ended up walking 25km (around 15.5 miles) - a distance which is so easy to do in this city! The climate, together with the pleasant streets of the North Shore especially, make wandering for hours a lovely way to spend a Saturday. As we meandered our way down to the Harbour Bridge, we spotted this little (big) stick insect, clearly someone should tell it that it is better suited to trees rather than gutters...
Having looked ahead at the forecast, we picked a cooler day to make the Christmas cake. Having the oven on for four hours at the high temperatures it has been lately would not have been pleasant!
Australian Ralph shed a little coat at the arrival of Spring, but Canadian Albie could have made fur coats for the both of them with the amount he has moulted - and he is still getting rid of it...